Phone Calls

Pick a voice, write a greeting, set your office number, ring your own phone first, decide what happens when the AI Receptionist cannot finish a call, and teach it words it says wrong.

The Phone tab holds everything about how the receptionist handles a call, in the order a call happens: who rings, how it sounds, and what it does when it gets stuck.

These settings are kept whether or not phone calls are switched on, so you can set them up before you go live. They only take effect once Phone calls is on under Channels.

Voice and greeting

Voice picks how the receptionist sounds. Choose the Apptoto default voice or one of the standard voices. Cloned voices, set up under Settings > Voices, are available on request.

Greeting is the first thing every caller hears, spoken exactly as written. Leave it blank to use the default, which is built from the business name on the Knowledge tab.

Caution

Some states require you to tell callers they are speaking with an AI. If that applies to you, say so in your greeting. Apptoto does not add a disclosure for you.

Click Try it beside the greeting to call your receptionist from your browser and hear the voice and greeting currently in the form, before you save them.

Typing sounds while looking things up lets callers hear keyboard noise while the receptionist checks your calendar, instead of it saying “let me check that for you”. With it off, it tells the caller what it is doing.

When the receptionist cannot help a caller

When the receptionist cannot help a caller, it takes a message for you, using the number they called from. You are notified wherever you already get notified about client replies.

Enable voicemail decides what that message looks like:

• Off - it asks for their name and what they need, then sends you a written message. Nothing is recorded.
• On - it says it is recording a message for the office, then the caller hears a beep and speaks in their own words. You get the recording.

A caller who asks to leave a message gets the same treatment straight away, without the receptionist trying to help first.

Some callers are not asking for anything - they are running late, or their plans have changed. The receptionist writes that down and passes it on, without promising anything on your behalf. It does this even with voicemail on, so a caller who has already told it everything is not asked to say it all again after the beep. The same goes for a caller who just wants someone to call them back.

Either way, the conversation shows up in your Inbox tagged Message taken or Voicemail, and on the Activity tab with the message or the recording length.

Transferring a caller to a person instead

Check Transfer the caller to a person instead, when: and describe in plain language when a transfer should happen. For example:

Weekdays before 4pm, or anyone who says it’s urgent. Never on Saturdays.

When your rule applies, the call goes to your Office phone number (below). Any other time, the receptionist offers to have someone call the caller back.

Leave the box blank to transfer whenever a caller asks for a person.

Office phone

Number is the number the receptionist rings first and sends transferred callers to. Leave it blank to use the number your Apptoto number already forwards to, which you set under Settings > Caller ID.

Avoid a call loop

Your office phone number must be a line that does not forward back to Apptoto. If you have forwarded your business line to your Apptoto number, put a direct line or a mobile number here instead, or transferred calls will come straight back to the receptionist.

Ring my phone first

With Ring my phone first checked, an incoming call rings your office phone before the receptionist picks up. Whoever answers hears who is calling and presses any key to take the call. If nobody does that in time, the receptionist takes the call instead.

The dropdown below the checkbox sets how long your phone rings first. Choose from 10 to 30 seconds, labeled with roughly how many rings that is.

Tip

Your phone’s voicemail cannot press a key, so it never steals the call, even if it answers first. That means you can leave your own voicemail set up as it is.

This is the setting to use when you want a person to get first crack at every call and the receptionist to be the safety net. A call the receptionist picks up this way never transfers back to the phone that just did not answer.

Pronunciations

The voice sometimes says a word wrong - a staff member’s name, your town, a product. Pronunciations, at the bottom of the Phone tab, fixes that. Click the heading to open it; it opens on its own once you have added a word.

Click Add a word, then fill in two boxes:

• Word - the word the way it is normally spelled, for example “Worcester”.
• Say it like - the word spelled the way it sounds, with capitals on the stressed part, for example “WUSS-ter”. A couple more: “win” for Nguyen, “ZEE-oh-min” for Xeomin.

On calls, the receptionist says the word the way you spelled it out, including in your greeting. Texts, emails, and call transcripts still spell it normally. Capitals do not matter when it matches the word, and it only matches whole words, so “Lee” does not change “Leeds”.

Click the red x beside a row to remove it. Rows with only one box filled in are dropped when you save.

Tip

Save first, then click Try it beside the greeting to hear how the new pronunciations sound.

A typical setup

1. Turn on Phone calls under Channels.
2. Pick a voice and write your greeting, then click Try it to hear it.
3. Choose what happens when it cannot help - check Enable voicemail if you want a recording instead of a written message.
4. Enter your office phone number, using a line that does not forward back to Apptoto.
5. Decide whether your phone rings first, and for how long.
6. Add any words the voice says wrong under Pronunciations.
7. Click Save.
8. Forward your business line to your Apptoto number so clients calling your published number reach the receptionist.